Friday, February 28, 2014

Venezuela’s Foreign
Minister, Elias Jaua, is touring Latina America explaining the government’s
version of the causes of the recent opposition protests.

According to the Agencia
Venezolana de Noticias, Jaua has so far visited Bolivia, Argentina,
Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil: “giving details of the reality of the country
and of a plan, with foreign funding, to topple the Bolivarian Revolution. [The
plan] is also supported by international media corporations that distort the
truth about what the Venezuelan people are living, and instead promote the
vandalism of violent shock groups of the right.”

In Buenos Aires, Jaua
explained that “the protests in Venezuela are not the result of political or
social dissatisfaction, but are the result of a strategy planned for five years,
(…) in order to overthrow the democratic government.”

In Brazil, Jaua
declared that “the violent [protests] groups have a racist character and
have been trained under the guidance of neo-Nazis and neo-fascists, financed by
United States institutions, such as the NED [National Endowment for Democracy]
and USAID, among others.”

On February 25,
before leaving for his South American tour, Jaua was the protagonist of an incident
with a reporter of the private TV channel TELEVEN. Jaua declared that
Colombian ex-president Uribe Vélez (often accused by the Venezuelan government
to be the mastermind behind conspiracies against the country) is the “boss of
the aggression against Venezuela, he is a paraco
[paramilitary] and is harming our fatherland, but we will defeat him.” The
TELEVEN reporter asked Jaua if he had any proofs of the accusations against
Uribe, Jaua lost his temper and retorted: “are you Venezuelan or Colombian?”

The next day, on
February 26, Colombian Foreign Minister María Teresa Holguín, publically
asked Jaua to show respect for Uribe Vélez: “We ask [Jaua] to refrain from such
expressions against Uribe (…). All countries have their problems, but we are
being asked to believe that all of Venezuela’s problems come from Colombia.”

Monday, February 24, 2014

As expected,
President Maduro’s interview
yesterday on Telesur was a detailed account of his conspiracy theory
explaining recent protests in Venezuela.

Here are some quotes
from the interview illustrating the official narrative of events:

“This is not just
another conspiracy campaign or another guarimba
(street protest), it is a continued coup d’état, which has been decided by the
power circles of the United States, in cahoots with the business leaders of
Venezuela, and directed and conducted on the streets by part of the Venezuelan extreme
right.”

“All in the
opposition know about this plan, all the business leaders of the country, many
of them have been secretly selling their assets. But they have not been able to
do this because the people have been able to defeat them.

“They (the
opposition) are trying, through a campaign of lies and manipulations, with a
lot of money from outside the country and supported by the power brokers of the
United States, to lead our country to an internal civil war, of violence
against our people.

“They are financing
the coup d’état from Colombia, they are training fascists groups, what they
want is to inoculate us with hatred, mutual hatred among Venezuelans, and thus
lead us to a confrontation, so that we will kill each other. They want to break
the unity of the Armed Forces, to break the civic-military union, and take us
to the brink of a United States intervention.”

Maduro ended the
interview calling for the formation of an independent “Truth Commission” which
would investigate recent events. However he also announced the future
results of the Commission's report: “Research all this violence, all the denunciations
of the on-going coup d’état, all the international and national lies, so that
we can unearth this monster that has been activated in order to justify a
foreign intervention in Venezuela.”

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Yesterday Maduro referred to claims that officers of the SEBIN (intelligence
police agency) may have fired with hand guns against student protestors on
February 12.

Maduro explained that
there is a possibility that these officers are conspirators inside the
government. He has declared before that some officers of the SEBIM may have disobeyed
his orders to remain in their barracks during the protests. Director of the
SEBIN, General Bernal Martínez, was
sacked last Tuesday.

In a press conference
with international reporters yesterday President Maduro again pointed to the US
State Department, Colombian ex-President Álvaro Uribe, and the “international
media” as being behind the recent opposition protests in the country, which he
characterized as an “on-going coup” against his government.

Most of the conference
was devoted to what he called a “international media campaign to demonize” his
image: “some in the media, such as CNN, have participated in the campaign
organized by the right, which is similar to the one they organized against comandante Chávez at the end of 2001 and
the beginning of 2002.”

Earlier, the Communication
Ministry (MINCI) had announced
it was opening an investigation against CNN for its reporting of the recent
events in Venezuela. CNN reporters Osmary Hernández and Patricia Janiot were
stripped of their press credentials and asked to leave the country.

According to the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN) “The President denounced mass media for
promoting a campaign that aims at dividing Latin America, and also seeks to
create a perception that Venezuela is at the doors of a civil war, thus filling
millions of people in the world with hatred.”

The plot by the US
State department, in cahoots with the “international mass media” would,
according to Maduro, include “the continuous attack by violent groups in the
country in order to weaken the government by causing civil commotion, [confronting]
the people against the people, causing division among the armed forces, with
the aim of justifying the intervention of a military force of NATO or the
United States.” The note press published by AVN added that “these plans also
include the toppling of the government and have been plotted and decided by
power groups in the Pentagon and the offices of the Department of Defense of
the United States.”

The President however
also said that it was time to “solve our differences with the United States through
diplomatic and political means,” and offered his willingness to exchange
ambassadors between the US and Venezuela.